


The Twine And The Things We Bind

by darkfinch



Category: Leverage
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Concussions, Eliot Spencer Whump, Friendship, Gen, Hurt Eliot Spencer, Hurt/Comfort, It's pre-OT3 I'm just allergic to writing relationships, Slightly more than canon-typical violence, Though we start heavy on the hurt and light on the comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:54:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25070452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkfinch/pseuds/darkfinch
Summary: Eliot gets hurt in the middle of a con. He handles it about as well as you'd expect.
Relationships: Alec Hardison & Parker & Eliot Spencer, Developing Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 32
Kudos: 135





	1. Blood & Bile & Vinegar

It’s supposed to be easy, is the thing. 

They’re pulling a basic Norweigan Handkerchief job on a CEO-turned-international antiquities smuggler, involving a flash drive of photoshopped blackmail material and a lovingly-forged teacup set from 1482. Nate’s already emptied out the office building in that quick-talking, sleight-of-everything way he does, save for a weekend skeleton crew of security guards and the mark’s assistant. 

It’s simple. It’s part two of a five-part plan. Parker’s in the vents; Hardison’s on the cameras and the internet and whatever else he does, something to do with the mark’s F Drive or CD Ron, Eliot doesn’t need to know; Sophie’s on the assistant. Eliot, to his satisfaction, is left to prowl around between the empty cubicles with a coffee mug in hand, keeping an eye out for any trouble heading anyone’s way. It’s simple and easy and a hell of a nice way to wind down after the mess that was their last job (two goddamn weeks in Munich and the whole con collapsed on top of them. Eliot’s fingers are still stained blue, faintly, if you know where to look). 

And then the alarm goes off. 

Because of course it does.

It’s a shrill, miserable thing, this alarm, and Eliot’s sure Parker could tell him the make and model and how to turn it off in six seconds flat, but Eliot has other skills and other problems. Eliot can hear footsteps about to round the corner—two men in cheap leather shoes with worn-down soles; security; out of shape—and can tell exactly how many of them have guns, which is both of them, which is two more guns than Eliot wanted to deal with today. He lets himself fantasize, for a precious fraction of a second, about walking away and driving home and cooking that new Ethiopian stew he’s been wanting to try. 

“We’ve got company,” he says instead, and turns to face his issues.

He’s two steps down the hall when he hears that telltale _crack_ of bullet leaving barrel _—a crisp, carbonated kind of sound; 9 mm, Ruger LC9—_ feels the back of his shirt go wet, and thinks, with a little shame, _Oh._ Three _guards._ And, from the sound of the footfalls coming from the stairwell to his left, more on the way. 

“Hold ‘em off,” says Nate, and Eliot does, ‘cause he’s a goddamn professional. 

The first three security guards go down like they know what’s good for them (with help from the coffee mug), but Eliot can feel the familiar sick-burn-tug of tearing muscle every time he moves his shoulder, and he knows the next three won’t be so easy.

He’s right. 

Sophie sweet-talks the mark’s assistant in his ear while he gets his second concussion of the month.

It happens like this: there’s a stairwell, and there are five guards, and two take a trip over the railing before anyone can start shooting. Then they start shooting. The walls are concrete and the bullets ricochet and the sound is fucking deafening, and it only takes two or three pulls of the trigger for them to figure out what Eliot learned a long time ago: that guns can hinder just as much as they can help. Soon someone’s on the floor bleeding out and screaming and it’s not Eliot, not yet, but the floor is slick with it, and the two guards left standing launch themselves towards him, and he’s _ready—_

He makes to sidestep them. He slips in the blood. 

It’s either fear or mortification that makes it happen in slow motion, Sophie laughing Fake Laugh Number Six in his ear while he’s falling backward down the stairs. He tucks himself in like he knows how to, braces himself, and it’s not enough. 

He hits one step. He hits two steps. He slams into the wall at the bottom with enough force that his teeth chatter, skull meeting concrete, and the sharp shock of pain that follows is blinding. The impact tastes like blood and bile and vinegar and he isn’t dead, but for a second, eyes dark, _wrongwrongwrong_ rushing through his nervous system like a lighting strike, he wants to be. 

“Oh, that's such a wonderful story,” Sophie purrs, somewhere very far away. 

Eliot’s stomach wants to leave his body by way of his throat. The last two security guards storm their way down toward him, steps echoing on the metal stairs like so many claps of thunder. He can feel the sound of the still-blaring alarm in his spine. He’s swallowing blood. He doesn’t know where it’s coming from.

He pushes himself up with a hand that doesn’t feel attached to his body, which doesn’t feel attached to his brain, which doesn’t want to be awake right now.

Muscle memory still holds strong even when the muscle doesn’t, thank God, thank whoever; Eliot’s not fully sure how it happens, but one second he’s standing, and the next the guards are lying in a heap on the floor, unmoving, and he’s joined them there.

His face is pressed in reverence against the forgiving cool of the concrete. 

He breathes. In, out, in, out, just to test. Just to see if he still can. He takes inventory. He has a couple more cracked ribs than he’d hoped to end the day with, and the still-bleeding hole in his shoulder is becoming a concern, and his lungs are starting to make a fuss when he asks them to take in air. And then there’s that brand new relentless jackhammer pain pounding away in his head. The alarm is shrieking and he wants to kill it. 

He’s gonna need an ice pack and a beer after this. 

“Eliot, man, you with me?” Hardison is doing a very good impression of someone who is calm.

“Turn it off,” Eliot groans, muffled by the concrete. 

“What?”

“The—it’s—the goddamn—” It’s too loud, it’s too loud, it’s too—

The alarm dies, and Eliot could kiss him. 

“Yeah,” he grunts, instead. “Yeah. With you.” He scrapes himself up off the floor with more than a little effort and leans heavily against the wall at his back, stomach heaving with the movement, tossing a shaky little thumbs up at the security camera flashing away above him. He opens his mouth to either vomit or give Nate the all-clear.

“Eliot, Parker needs backup,” says Nate.

“Nate, Eliot’s _down_ ,” says Hardison.

“Hardison, lead me to Parker,” says Eliot, and it’s a testament to Hardison’s confidence in him (or blind, panicked denial) that he does as Eliot asks and starts directing him through the halls at a bleeding snail’s pace. It’s as easy as breathing isn’t; left turn right turn left, and he’s there, counting bodies and guns and looking for that telltale flash of blonde hair up by the air vents. Four men, four guns, one Parker. 

He wipes the blood out of his eyes and gets to work.

His body and his brain aren’t tied together anymore, really, but that’s okay; his body still knows what to do, heavy and hurting as it is, and his fist cracks into the first man’s face as sure and as quick as if he’d meant to do it. As if he’d thought about it, first. The second security guard takes an elbow to the throat and lets out that perfect cottony choking sound, the one they’ll make when he gets it just right, and Eliot feels good despite how awful moving feels. He takes that one’s gun and unloads it (always with that little twinge of both want and revulsion deep in his gut, always both, always). 

Eliot hits him with his own gun. Eliot is doing okay. 

The third and fourth are tricky, and it might have something to do with the way the room has started to tilt, a little, the way it’s getting darker and fuzzier around the edges. His head snaps backward from a punch to the face. He clings onto the wall of a nearby cubicle to keep himself upright, stomach heaving, head spinning. Eliot doesn’t throw up, ‘cause Eliot’s not a baby; he hits right back and feels a jaw break under his fist. 

Eliot loses track of the fourth guard for long enough to feel a blow to his ribs and not know where it came from, gets a mouthful of his own hot blood for his trouble, and it’s times like these where he thinks he might mind dying a violent death, after all. There’s a horrible grinding in his shoulder and Hardison’s frantic voice in his ear and he can’t quite hold onto either of them. His mouth tastes bitter and sweet and dead and his hands are going cold. His eyes won’t focus.

“Come on,” he says. “Come on.” He's not sure who he’s talking to.

Guard three—four? Which one has the broken jaw?—answers with a fist that comes swinging from out of the dark in his peripheral vision, and he brings up a clumsy hand to block it before he really knows it’s there. _Come on_ , he thinks, this time to himself. He can fight blind. He can fight bleeding. He just needs the room to stop spinning for a second. 

Eliot growls and throws his body towards the nearest blurry mass in front of him. _Crack, crack, crack._ Fractures like fireworks. The world is reeling and melting together but he can still feel that sharp-sweet-sting of solid impact—like honey, like music, this awful thing he’s good at—and knows he’s doing something right. 

He breaks someone’s ribs. He breaks someone’s arm. He breaks someone’s neck. He checks the hair, first, runs a hand over the face, makes sure it’s not Parker or Nate or anyone else. One guard left, then. One guard isn’t so bad. Eliot leans heavily against a wall and wills the room to right itself.

The one guard is in front of him, then. The one guard steps towards him with something metallic in his hands, glinting like death under the fluorescent lights, and Hardison is yelling something distant and muffled in his ear, and he doesn’t know where Parker is, and his legs are numb, and—

The man crumples with a dull thump and there's someone behind him, someone small, holding a taser and a bag of climbing gear.

“Hi, Parker,” Eliot says, and tries to make his face smile.

His knees buckle and the world stops.

* * *

He wakes up, and regrets it for several days. 

This is in spite of the morphine the nurses keep offering and he keeps refusing (and someone keeps giving him anyway, the moment his eyes slip closed). This pain is the deep kind. It’s sticky and thick and burrows into his nerves; Morphine and Dilaudid and _God_ couldn’t touch it.

The world comes in burning film-reel flashes. He blinks and there’s gold hair everywhere around him, a woman’s voice, telling him something firm and important he can’t quite make out; he blinks and there’s a warm dark hand on his wrist, thumb rubbing soft little circles into his skin; he blinks and his throat is raw and he’s telling them again, _no morphine, no morphine, it’ll only make me useless._

And then he’s awake enough to know they’re sitting around his hospital bed and lucid enough to hate it. His patient wristband says John James Morell. 

“You should press the button,” Parker says. Eliot doesn’t know what button she’s talking about, and unless pressing it’ll get him into a cab back to his place to lick his wounds in private, he’s not interested. There’s tape on his arm and it itches.

“It’s for the morphine,” Hardison says. Eliot wonders if he’s been talking out loud. The lights are too bright. He hates it here. 

“You sound funny,” Parker offers in response, eating cereal dry out of one of those tiny hotel buffet boxes. It makes his teeth hurt to look at. Eliot drags back the hem of his hospital gown and Lo And Behold he’s been pulled back together, needle and thread and bone and meat, and he thinks of his momma sewing up his old ripped jeans, and he tells Hardison to take the morphine himself if he likes it so much. 

“What?” Sophie asks. Hardison left an hour ago, she says, and did he hear anything she’s been telling him, about his body and his brain and the blood he doesn’t have? Something something pneumothorax? Eliot grunts and goes back to sleep. 

They do this until he’s long past sick of it, until time gets watered down enough to work again and his head clears. 

None of it is even that bad, it turns out. He can stand. He can walk, mostly. He might have to give his muscles a week or two (or three) to knit themselves back together before he can fight properly again, and his head is full of molasses and broken glass, but that comes with the territory. Bullets’ll do that. He’s had far worse done to his body—Maracaibo, Tehran, Kaliningrad, breaking and healing and breaking again, a hundred times and a hundred different ways—and it’s fine, ‘cause that’s what’s he’s built for. 

For his trouble, Eliot gets a sling and some pain meds he won’t take, grabs a cab back to his place, and collapses onto his couch with an ice pack and a beer he forgets to drink. 

“You should let one of us stay with you,” Sophie says, somewhere between the hospital bed and the cab door closing, dark eyes wide and imploring. She says it like she’s been writing and re-writing the delivery of that one line for hours, tone and words, eyes locked onto his. She brushes his split knuckles with her fingertips. Hardison stares at his chest like he can see the breaks in his bones through the bandages there. 

Eliot has to swallow back the yearning that sparks in his stomach, then. He’s only half-successful, can feel that quiet _yes-please-stay_ chanting its betrayal out from under what’s left of his ribcage. This is what all of it leads to, he thinks. It’s all that time spent with them. Having a team. Having company. He’s gotten addicted to it. It’s a moon-on-tide pull of _don’t leave me here alone_ pressing into his chest and making him want, against all reason, to cave. A different Eliot, a younger one, might’ve done. “Alright, Sophie,” this other Eliot would say, not yet buried by war and dug up again and turned into a thing that kills and likes it. “That sounds like a good idea.” 

He can picture it too clearly: Parker or Hardison or Sophie (not Nate, never Nate; Nate is too much like him) following him home to his always-empty apartment, leading him up the steps with a hand on his shoulder just in case he stumbled. And they’d stay—just for a bit, just to keep an eye on him, just to see he didn’t die all quiet and bloodless and soft in his sleep—and he’d feel...well. He doesn’t need any of that, not really, not anymore; and even if he did, he’s done his job long enough to know that some things aren’t worth the risk of having. 

Eliot grunts at her. It’s not her fault, he thinks. She’s offering him a bear trap and telling him to stick his arm into it and see what happens, and she doesn’t know; and that’s okay, because Eliot’s not gonna be the one to tell her.

So, he checks himself out against doctor’s (and Sophie’s) orders. He drags himself back home. He curls up on the couch in a way that doesn’t hurt as much as all the other ways do, and uses an ice pack for a pillow, and lets his beer go warm on the coffee table. He falls asleep listening to the patter of rain on the roof. 

He gets six hours of peace before Parker comes through the window.


	2. Concrete & Petrichor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hardison has good hands. Parker doesn't steal a sword. Eliot makes french toast.

What is meant to happen is that Parker shows up, rain-soaked and glorious, with a basket of gifts he doesn’t want and the precious burden of her company.

What happens is that Eliot rips his stitches and almost stabs her in a blind panic.

She’s going to set her presents down on his coffee table; she’s going to shake him awake gleefully and tell him that Hardison is standing outside his door, ready to barge in with a box of DVDs and a fresh batch of his latest awful beer whether he likes it or not. She finds him swaying in the living room, holding the knife he can’t sleep without, bleeding all over himself.

He wants to blame it on the head injury, or the last dredges of morphine still trickling their way out of his system. It doesn’t matter. Either way, the near-silent creak of the window being shimmied open rouses him from a dead sleep and pushes every panic button left in his body. 

It goes like this: 

He’s asleep, warm and resting his face on a melted ice pack in his living room.

The window opens,

_And he’s snapping awake in a hotel room in Warsaw and someone is coming through the window, someone is creaking the floorboards outside his door, and he knows it’s Moreau’s men just like he knew bone-deep what would happen if he ran from him. He knows, he knows, knife in hand, that they aren’t going to kill him, and that’s worse; they’re going to drag him back to answer for the things he refused to do; they’re going to turn him back into the thing he was and it’s either kill them all or face that, and his lungs are heaving, and his head is spinning, and his shirt is wet where it meets his shoulder—_

“Eliot,” Parker says, careful like soothing a spooked horse, or—no, careful like she’s trapped and he’s rabid, and God, she is, he might as well be—

“Eliot,” Parker says again, just his name, sure and golden. “Eliot. Eliot”. 

A second and a minute and a year pass. 

His heartbeat is deafening in his ears. 

It’s not her voice that does it, in the end. It’s the rain. It’s the air from the open window, concrete and petrichor, cold and dark and wet, that washes that other reality from his skin and shocks him back to the present. He finds himself back in his body, where he is bleeding and shivering and clutching a knife so hard his knuckles ache.

They are in his living room. A blue stuffed rabbit is peeking out of the basket in Parker’s arms. She is standing very still. 

“Parker,” Eliot says, low and quiet, “Never do that again.”

She nods. 

Parker goes to let Hardison in through the front door; Eliot tucks the knife back into its hiding place under the lip of the coffee table, and staggers to the bathroom to splash water on his face. He tries to slow the jackhammering between his ribs. He does not think about Warsaw, and does not think about Parker bleeding out on his floor, and does not think about how he would’ve had to explain that to the team. 

“El-i-ot!” Hardison is in his apartment. Eliot grips the bathroom counter. “I come with tidings of—what? He’s grumpy? Mama, he’s always grumpy. Eliot, I brought beer and DVDs, man, it’s gonna be chill as hell.”

* * *

After he’s argued himself hoarse about them being there, and the terrible beer’s found its way into his fridge, Eliot slumps down onto the edge of the bathtub and lets Hardison try to fix his stitches. 

The porcelain is cool on his skin and he sits with his back to the room like it’s something natural for him. Easy. Calm, calm, calm, is Eliot, breathing just this side of too-steady, shower curtain brushing at his arm. Hardison is set up on the toilet with the first aid kit in hand, not calm and not steady at all; his gloved fingers rest, trembling, over the skin at Eliot’s spine, and Eliot can feel how warm his hands are, even through the latex.

They’ve gone over the instructions. They’ve watched some tutorials on YouTube. It’s been eight and a half minutes and his shoulder is still bleeding. 

Eliot sighs. “Look, if y’can’t do it—”

“Shut up, man, I can do it,” Hardison snaps immediately, voice a little too high. “I hacked the FBI’s firewall when I was, like, fourteen ‘cause I was bored, okay—”

“Okay, Hardison—”

“—I can conjure up an airtight fake ID like a damn wizard in two minutes flat, Eliot, I can—”

“I get it, Hardison—”

“—keep your slow ass out of trouble on the regular, I can—these hands right here are magic, okay, I can do a couple stitches. _‘If you can’t do it.’_ Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about—”

So, they sit. From outside the door, there comes a sound like maybe Parker has decided to vault over the couch. He decides not to think about it. Eliot flexes his fingers; counts to twenty; traces the thin lines of grout between tile with the one eye that isn't swollen shut. Hardison has a couple false starts with the needle. The clock on the wall says _tick, tick, tick._

“What is it you’re so worried about, ‘zactly?” He doesn’t quite mean to ask it out loud. His mouth is heavy. His jaw twinges when it moves. He wants the curved needle to dip under his skin and tie him back together, preferably within the hour, so he can go drink his warm beer on the couch and pass out and pretend there’s no one else in his apartment.

Hardison lets out a shaky breath. Eliot doesn’t look back at him, uses his body as a barrier like he’s good at. Gives him some privacy. Waits.

“I just...dunno, man,” Hardison mutters, thumb now rubbing absent little circles into Eliot’s skin, just between his ribs, and Eliot feels his breath stutter, feels his whole world narrow right down to that gentle movement. He wonders if Hardison even knows he’s doing it. “I just don’t wanna—what if I do it wrong? I don’t wanna hurt you or anything.”

“Damnit, Hardison, I’m already—”

“Already hurt, yeah, yeah, I know, I get it, but that doesn’t exactly make me super eager to start stabbing you with shit, alright?” He pauses, like he’s not sure he wants to say what he says next. “Look, it—it was bad. When you fell, I mean. I don’t...” 

Eliot’s never known what to do with being on the receiving end of pity, if that’s what this is. It makes his skin crawl a bit.

“I won’t even feel it,” Eliot lies. He tries to make his voice sound reassuring. “The meds Parker gave me earlier? I’m not feelin’ a whole lot of anything right now, man. Just go for it.”

They probably wouldn’t have helped much for this, anyway, but he’d tucked the pills under his tongue and stashed them in his bedside table, like it’s not his apartment and he’s not an adult man who can just say _no_ to people. They don’t need to know. Eliot’s not even sure how he’d explain it if they asked, anyway, aside from an eye-roll and a petulant _I don’t need it._ It's a little ridiculous. He knows it's a little ridiculous. 

He’s learned to carry his guilt well enough over the years that he doesn’t think all pain is penance, anymore. The pain is just something that _happens_. Hitters get hit. It’s bound right into the meat of him, by now; an anchor in the form of fingers that never healed right, broken and reset and broken again, still aching whenever it gets cold; his stiff back warning him when it’s gonna rain, painful in the shape of shrapnel; the echo of every blow he’s ever taken, buried and rattling around in his bones every once in a while. He wears the punishment like a pair of well-loved boots. It’s familiar. It makes him feel real, this natural part of a comforting cycle: Get hurt, hurt, heal. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Plus, he kinda hates his brain on narcotics. So.

He hears Hardison nod behind him—fabric shifting against muscle, it’s a very distinctive sound—and take a deep breath. Soon enough, the hacker’s hands guide the needle along (hesitant at first, and slow, but steady) and Eliot holds his breath. Keeps his body locked-muscle, sniper-patience still. Pats Hardison on the back with his good arm when he’s done, and shoves the first aid kit back under the sink where it belongs. 

They shuffle back to the living room together. Hardison insists on supporting some of Eliot’s weight, and it should be embarrassing—this sudden weakness, his body no longer being useful in the ways it should be, Hardison guiding him through his own goddamn house like they’re doing an awkward three-legged race—but instead all he feels is tired. His head is spinning. 

“Is Eliot all stitched up again? Like Frankenstein?” Parker is waiting for them, cross-legged on the coffee table like there’s not an empty armchair right next to her. She’s eating his leftovers and wearing his sweater.

“Yup,” says Hardison, grunting a little as he helps lower Eliot to the couch. “Exactly like Frankenstein.” He reaches out for their usual handshake, _tap tap pop;_ Eliot obliges with a smile he’s only half faking.

Parker gives Hardison a high five to match, and Hardison laughs at something, and Eliot doesn’t know what it means that the apartment feels warmer with them here. Less like a hotel room. Less like a place he comes to crash between jobs. Doesn’t know what it means for him to want them here—well, not _want_ , no. Like. _Wanting_ is dangerous. Liking is cleaner, easier; he can like the idea of something without it boiling him alive, low and slow like the metaphorical frog. 

He looks at Hardison’s grin, bright and white and mischievous, and feels off-balance. Uneasy. Like he’s caught in someone’s crosshairs, and can’t tell where they’re shooting from. Eliot watches, and squints through his headache, and tries to map the trajectory.

* * *

“It’s very shiny.” Parker is staring at the Hanzō sword in its display case above the TV, with that green little glint she gets in her eye.

Eliot glares out at her from under his ice pack. “No.” 

“You don’t think it’s shiny?” she asks, voice bright and innocent. He doesn’t buy it for a second.

“Parker,” he grumbles, shifting the ice to cover his eyes where they ache, “if you steal my goddamn sword—”

“You’ll be grumpy? Because you like it?”

“Yeah, Parker, I’ll be grumpy, ‘n’ I’ll break your fingers, and then who’s gonna pick all the locks?”

“No, you won’t.” She laughs a little too loudly, in that way she always does, and he can tell she’s not just saying that because he can only see out the one eye and can’t make it across the living room without help. It’s not about the weapon of his body. She _knows_ he won’t, trusts despite the noise he makes that he would never hurt her. It makes it a little hard to breathe, the weight of that. He presses the ice pack hard against his eyes.

“No,” he croaks, “I won’t.”

* * *

They’re a whirlwind of annoyance and noise and _talk_. They pick up everything he owns and ask questions about it and somehow, several full entire hours later, he still doesn’t hate having them here. He _wants_ their company, God help him, and not only in that miserable _just make sure I don’t die in my sleep, just make me feel like I’m something worth caring about for a little while_ kind of way he’d thought he might. It sets his teeth on edge. 

Time passes in quick, dizzy snippets. He squints at the clock, and it’s four, and he’s thinking he might be hungry. He squints at the clock, and it’s six thirty-five, and he hasn’t moved, and he isn’t sure what’s happened. 

Nate and Sophie call once or twice, and say to keep them up to date; Eliot knows this’s supposed to sound like _get well soon_ and _we’re worried_ and _we care about you_ , if Sophie’s anxious voice through the speakers of Hardison’s cell phone is anything to go by. He also knows that, regardless of how it’s supposed to sound, it means something else entirely. It means _when’ll you be okay enough to work_ and _do we have to plan around this_ and _d’you know any other good hitters_? 

He grunts out answers when he has to, and keeps his eyes shut, and hopes against reason he’ll be fine enough to move by end of week.

In the meantime, waiting to see if Eliot’s body decides to suck it up or not, Hardison sets him up for wifi. He makes the password a Lord of the Rings reference he mostly gets, and downloads some social media app on Eliot’s phone while he’s sleeping, and “follows” himself. Eliot doesn’t understand the point of about half of it—and the light from the screen shines _right_ into the part of his brain that aches, makes his jaw clench, makes his body want to curl away from it—but Hardison smiles at him as he explains it, and lets Eliot make fun of the whole thing, and, well.

Parker, meanwhile, finds every emergency weapon he’s got stashed around the apartment and moves them, and when he yells about that very much defeating the point (“If I reach down and there’s no fucking knife there and someone’s trying to kill me, Parker, I’ll _die._ ” “But you should’ve picked better hiding places—” “The point is that I can _find them easily if something happens_ —” “But—”) she just laughs, and won’t tell him where they’ve all ended up. _Like a scavenger hunt_ , she tells him, and he groans into the couch.

He finds a throwing knife duct-taped to the grab-bar he’d installed by the bathtub when he’d first moved in, and questions her sanity, and then questions his for letting her be here. 

* * *

It’s dawn, and Eliot closes his eyes for a minute—just to rest them, just to make his head quit spinning, just ‘cause his shoulder feels like sand and swelling and ache—and then the sun is low and hot in the sky, quick like the pull of a trigger, like time’s forgotten how to line itself up in order properly. 

He finds himself tucked in under a soft red blanket he vaguely remembers seeing in Parker’s gift basket (which had consisted of one stuffed blue rabbit, two blankets, two pocket knives, and a wad of cash), and the warmth of it feels—he feels—

“Wakey wakey,” says a voice from somewhere near his head.

Parker’s balanced on the back of the couch, feet dangling onto the cushions next to him, munching on dry cereal that he knows for a fact she didn’t get from his kitchen. There’s a true crime show on. He thinks he can hear Hardison shuffling around somewhere, by the bedroom-turned-guestroom, humming some vaguely-familiar theme song tunelessly under his breath.

“Doncha eat’ny relfood?” The words come out of his mouth all mushed together. Parker squints down at him, cheek stuffed full of shitty cereal like a chipmunk. He tries again.

“I have...I can make eggs, y’know. Still. I could make you some eggs.” 

She considers his offer as she chews. “Pancakes?”

“Uh…” He thinks of all the mixing, and his shoulder, and wonders if his hand-mixer still works since the last time he used it. “How ‘bout french toast? I can work french toast. Best of both worlds.” 

Parker agrees. She drags over a tall chair from by the window (he likes to sit and watch the birds, sometimes, when it’s early and there’s not a thief and a hacker crashing his peace and quiet), and leaves it by the kitchen counter without a word, and he gets started. 

Well, first he makes his way to the chair, slow and stiff and crouched over like he’s three times his age. _Then_ he gets started.

Cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg into a bowl. Easy, easy, easy. Gets some of his good vanilla and adds that. A little extra brown sugar, because it’s Parker. Eggs, milk, half-stale brioche cut a little too thick to be reasonable. Parker follows his hands with her eyes, gives him the kind of focus she usually reserves for cracking safes, perched up on the corner of the counter like a little yellow bird. 

Parker, he learns, likes to watch butter melt. She leans in and tilts her head this way and that, listening to the sound, watching the golden square in the middle of the pan go liquid and start to bubble, and it makes something under Eliot’s ribcage feel rich and sweet and warm. His shoulder burns with the effort—holding the bowl, whisking slowly by hand because there is, in fact, mixing involved in this, and his hand mixer does not, in fact, work—but it’s okay. It’s worth it. His hands are busy, and Parker has icing sugar on her nose, and he doesn’t mind anything much at all. 

Hardison wanders into the kitchen at some point, barefoot, balancing his laptop in one hand and a half-empty bottle of orange soda in the other. 

“Uh, Eliot,” says Hardison, and Eliot’s hand clenches a little too hard on the whisk, because he knows that tone, “should you really be—”

“You want french toast?” Eliot asks forcefully.

“I’m just saying, we can order—”

“French toast, yes or no.”

“...Yes?”

“Awesome. Pass me that pie plate and go sit down.” 

And Hardison does. And Hardison looks comfortable, doing it. He looks...altogether too comfortable, actually, pyjama pants low on his hips, wandering around Eliot’s house like he lives there. Like he belongs there, smile wide and bright and easy. He pecks Parker on the cheek as he sidles past, and Eliot thinks about warm hands rubbing gentle circles into his skin, and feels something hot and prickly unfurl in his stomach in the shape of _You Can’t Have This_ , and all of a sudden Eliot loses his grip on both his calm and the whisk. 

It hits the floor, and egg spatters on tile like arterial spray. 

“Oh,” Hardison says, “hey, lemme get that.” He very compassionately does not look at Eliot, who is trapped in a chair he's not sure he can get out of on his own, torso stiff and aching, running a hand through his hair and staring into the sink and having a crisis out of nowhere and over _nothing_. Parker is not compassionate.

“Are you having a Big Freakout?” He can hear the capitalizations in her voice.

“No,” he says, and his voice is coming out funny. Thin and watery. “No,” he tries again. 

“Why are you having a Big Freakout?” Parker asks. Hardison moves to rinse off the whisk and hand it back to him.

“Don’t bother,” Eliot tells Hardison instead of answering, “just—leave it in the sink, there’s a spare, in the cupboard. No, to your left. Other left, genius, by the—yeah. Thanks.” 

Eliot piles them up a stack of french toast high enough that Parker cheers and Hardison looks overwhelmed, and the two of them get through half a bottle of maple syrup on their own, and they tell him it’s good, that he’s done good, and it’s...something. He feels it glowing under his ribcage, that warmth, that _good_. It mingles strangely with that pricky feeling, tempers it a little, and he doesn’t know what to make of that.

He drags himself back to the couch on his own steam and pretends to sleep.

* * *

“You wanna watch something else?” Hardison is asking. Eliot gives him a noncommittal grunt.

He’s still on the couch, and trying not to exist; his body’s hit some invisible wall, and while he’s been drifting in and out for the better part of the night and the following day, he’s found himself a little more in than out for the time being. He wishes he wasn’t. It feels like something’s trying to beat his brain into submission. They’ve got the hockey game on with the volume turned down low; next to him, in his favourite armchair, Hardison’s doing something complicated on his laptop—the con’s not over, not yet, and they can’t just stop on Eliot’s body’s account—or maybe playing BattleWars with his gnome friends or whatever, it’s hard to tell. 

He can feel the clicking of the keyboard clattering around his skull.

“Eliot, you want any soup?” Parker asks from the kitchen.

“No,” Eliot says, and his voice sounds like gravel. He doesn’t know what she considers soup, and his stomach doesn’t know he’s supposed to be hungry by now, and he doesn’t like that she’s in his kitchen. He doesn’t like that they keep asking him if he wants anything. He wants quiet and for his head to quit hurting and for Parker to quit touching his stuff. He wants to be hitting something. Working. Useful. Something that isn’t this.

“You want more fancy pain meds?” The microwave starts to beep, sharp and insistent. 

“No, Parker, I’m fine.” 

“You wanna call Nate?” Hardison asks, not looking up from the screen. _Tap tap tap tap tap_ , say Hardison’s fingers, flying across the keys. 

Eliot’s face twists. “Name one reason why I’d want that.”

“Uhhh.” Hardison’s fingers pause. He blinks at Eliot expectantly. “‘Cause your whole entire, like,” he gestures vaguely in Eliot’s general direction, “Situation is officially fucked and we’re gonna need to tell him to rework the con?”

Here’s the thing: they’re on day four (three? His internal clock has just quit ticking completely at this point) of Eliot’s body refusing to magically heal itself, and he still can’t move too quick without the whole world spinning, and he’s tough, but he’s not stupid. Stubborn, maybe, but not stupid. They’ve been keeping the mark in limbo for as long as they can, but too much longer and the whole thing’ll go cold and stale and they’ll have to give it up. He can’t be the reason they give it up. He bounces between fear and denial for a long moment; denial wins out, as it tends to, with him.

“Gimme a couple days and I’ll be fine,” Eliot says. Hardison stares at him. Eliot stares right back.

“You don’t actually _believe_ that, right, man? Like you’re not actually-factually sitting there with your scrambled-egg brain like yeah, totally, gimme fifteen hours and an aspirin—”

“Damnit, Hardison, I said I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, alright?” The room feels too small. A sliver of fear sneaks past the denial. “I’ll figure somethin’ out, we ain’t reworking _shit_ , okay, _no one’s calling Nate_.”

There’s a heavy silence. Eliot closes his eyes. Hardison starts typing again. 

Eliot’d once been laid up in a tiny hotel room in Iran with a shot up leg for thirty-six hours before he’d forced himself up and onwards, and it’d been fine, but the only channel the TV’d been able to pick up had been some nature documentary in a language he couldn’t speak. He’d been in pain, then, too, watching leopards stalking lesser things through the haze of his fever until the sun came up. Near the end, there’d been a lion. Just the one lion, alone, hide caked with her own blood, limping across sun-baked earth towards nothing at all. The camera followed her. The flies followed her. 

Eliot remembers knowing, deep in his gut, without the help of the narrator or anything else, that she was going to die. That maybe if she got some water and laid down and rested for the night, she’d make it a little longer; but she wouldn’t do even that. She was muscle and sinew and blood, a perpetual motion machine, and nothing in her knew how to sit and be useless. Stopping meant death; resting meant death; walking meant death, too, sure, but if all choices led to the same shitty outcome, she’d prefer to walk. 

Hardison won’t stop typing. Eliot’s head is splitting open. He moves to pick himself up off the couch and find a fresh ice pack, and suddenly Parker is _right there,_ smiling at him expectantly. She’s holding the ice pack and the pills and the blue stuffed rabbit. He thinks he might burst into hives.

“For God’s sake, Parker, I ain’t a fuckin’ invalid,” he snarls, too loud and too sharp. Feral. There’s a ringing in his ears. Hardison stops typing. “I can take care of myself. I don’t even know why you two’re here.” 

His mouth is moving. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but his body is heavy and broken and too small for him, and he’s not good for the one thing he’s supposed to be good for, the one thing they need him for, and they’re gonna need to go in alone or get rid of him and move on, and he’s pushed himself through so much worse on his own and done _fine—_

“We’re helping,” says Parker in that small, unbalanced voice he hates to hear from her. “Sophie said that giving people things they need when they’re sick is how you show you care about them—”

“What I _need_ is eight hours of sleep, and some _quiet_ , and I can’t get that with you two runnin’ around my goddamn place and—” His brain catches up to his mouth then, hears what she’s said about Sophie and the caring, and his mouth snaps shut. “Oh.”

Hardison’s eyes are boring into the side of his head. Parker is staring at him like he’s a safe in a wall and she’s going to work him open, is looking at him like maybe if she tries hard enough, maybe if she gets all the tumblers aligned, she’ll hear a _click_ and he’ll make sense to her. Her eyes are very blue.

Parker is straightforward. He knows this. Parker says what she means when she means it. He looks at her, and pictures her and Sophie and Hardison and Nate, trusting and dependant; pictures himself lumbering around at twenty percent function, stubborn and angry and fucking up the job. Letting one of them get hurt. Letting one of them get killed. Having that on his hands. He can’t even sit still and Not Yell At Them properly, not even for a day or two, not even with how desperate he’d been for their company until he’d gotten it. And now he’s yelling and she cares about him and they’re still down a hitter.

 _You’re not built for this_ , he thinks, and it kicks the fight right out of him. 

He takes the ice pack and the rabbit and slumps back onto the couch; Parker curls up next to him, quick and light and easy like she’s invited, and he hates her.

“Call Nate,” he says, and shuts his eyes. 

* * *

Eliot dreams he’s in the back of an ambulance. Everything is in and out of focus, black and burning around the edges, but he can tell it’s an ambulance from the screaming of the siren. Sophie is screaming, too. 

“—The bleeding, but his head—” Nate is saying somewhere above him. 

“—Have to—pressure—,” Sophie is yelling back at him. Her hands are warm and trembling on his shoulder, tacky with cooling blood. She is trying to hold him together. “—fall? Hardison—”

Eliot’s mouth tastes like copper and salt and he is not afraid; someone is holding his hand. The ambulance lurches like he’s riding in the head of a staggering drunk, and his head is spinning, and his throat makes an odd, high sound.

“—Sorry, I’m sorry,” Parker is saying. He doesn’t know where she is. He wonders if they’re letting her drive. 

“—On, Eliot,” Hardison is saying. Eliot’s eyes are closed, now. He doesn’t remember closing them. “You’re gonna—fine, okay, you’re gonna be—”

He wakes up on the couch in the dark, thirsty, body aching. Someone’s woven tiny braids into his hair while he slept.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I think we've gotten most of the angsting out of the way; Eliot's just a little grumpy when he's out of commission. All kudos and comments are treasured, and I hope you're having a lovely week!


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